#sampling music

headache

not home

This is a very personal piece.

I just tripped over a YouTube thing that was a bit unnerving. It adds a dark dimension to listening to Music. Well at least to new music and digital streaming. It may also prove the idea that old music is actually better. The older the better. Maybe new music on streams is not even music.

Art is one of the two highest endeavors of human kind. We hairless apes make a lot of mess generally, but works of art define what is good about us. For the record the other thing is science as far a systematic understanding of how things work. That is not the same as technology kids.

So here is a very cogent explanation of why older stuff is actually worth the effort to listen to it. New stuff is very suspect.

New artists or recent artists find a niche and play around. They tend to all sound the same to my ear. And compared to stuff from 30 years ago much seems to have no soul. The fact that a young girl with almost no life experience and her brother can make a hit album in their bedroom and win Grammies undermines skilled musicianship and even the art of song writing.

To my ear Taylor Swift songs sound very much all the same. Being locked away during the plague was good for her music, but now she churns out album after album with apparently little effort and all the songs are strangely familiar. Hey I respect her as a brilliant business person. She works very hard. I am glad for her success. But her body of work is just not on the same level as many old school song writers.

I think of Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchel. Many many more of course. There was a deep reality to those songs. The music was played by humans that had a stake in the work. All before the age of sampling and digital workstation magic.

Then mix in the idea that AI will write songs or help other kids in basements that cannot even play instruments do that and get hits. Dark days indeed. Take the ART out of ART and just call it noise.

{further thoughts}

If you want fast convenient food you go to a burger chain, or joint. They will toast a bun made at a factory far away. They will heat a meat patty and put some stuff on it and call it a sandwich. Served with salty fried potatoes and you have lunch. Is it good? Are there better things to eat?

Streaming is like fast food. Convenient and quick and usually low quality as it is an industrial product. Rick Beato has some other videos on top songs from streaming services. Many he decides are not really songs. Just some words attached to some musical sounds. Much of those sounds are samples of real songs editted together and mixed with a few more notes here and there. AI can "write a new song" using samples and musical quotes and similar words. It is already happening. Are there not better things to listen too?

Oh and Jazz. AI is incapable of doing Jazz as it is human. AI is a poor cheating imitation.

let me enjoy the game

cellar door’s take on Sampling

In short, sampling is the practice (an art form some may say) of taking a portion of another sound recording, music or not, and reusing it in another sound recording. Samples come in many shapes and sizes. They can be speech sounds, instrument sounds, ambient sounds, beats and even lyrics. Musique concrète, which originated in the 1940s, was a way of making music out of previously recorded sounds. Artists who indulged in this kind of music composition would literally take tapes, cut the audio out that they wanted and then proceed to manipulate them via music technology. The point of musique concrète was to find “music” in everyday sounds by looping them, slowing them down or speeding them up. Now, thanks to some French dudes, sampling was (sort of) born. Of course, artists were borrowing from each other since the beginning of music; sampling is an inherent element in music-making.

In the 1960s, Jamaican dub reggae artists would take previously recorded reggae tracks to create faster songs to dance to and then they would DJ over them, these songs were called riddim (not EDM, though they share the same name). Jamaican immigrants who moved to America shared their practice of sampling and so began its roots in hip hop in the 70s. Sampling is the foundation of hip-hop itself, which is why it’s so widely used in the genre today. DJs would use turntables and loop breaks in soul records from artists like James Brown and use them to rap over for their audiences.

So why do some people despise sampling? Is it because they don’t know about its history and thus make blind assumptions of stealing (yes.)? Or is it because they do know what sampling is and they still don’t exactly agree with the “taking” of intellectual property even if it is manipulated to create another work? I’m not the one to say, but I can say that there is plenty of controversy surrounding sampling in the music world. I mean sure, it is very wrong to literally take someone’s work, copy it, paste it and then call it your own. To me, that’s not what sampling is. Sampling is about paying homage or shouting out something you really like as a music artist and it gives artists even MORE creative room to work with. It gives artists the chance to share something new with their audiences and it sometimes propels the original to new stardom. Sampling also creates a unique space for music to be made of other music which is pretty meta if you ask me. However, running into copyright issues is where it can get tricky and controversial. Of course, nowadays, you hear a lot about artists having trouble getting samples cleared because of how expensive and difficult it is to get through copyright rules. Imagine all of the good, juicy sampled music we could have if these samples had been cleared. Personally, I love sampling. For me, it’s like finding hidden treasure because the original song is ALWAYS better than the song with the sample. It also broadens my musical horizons greatly and gives a song another layer of history. Hip hop and electronic music are my most favorite genres and sampling is at the base of their creation so I am all for it.

“Thrift Shop” by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, “Cure For The Itch” by Linkin Park and “Female Funk” by Too Short. Initially, these songs sound like they have little in common. They’re totally different from each other. How could they be connected? Well, all three songs contain a barely two-second long sample from Beside’s “Change the Beat (Female Version),” a remix of “Change the Beat (Male Version)” by American hip-hop artist, Fab 5 Freddy. According to Who Sampled, there are more than 1,000 other songs that also contain samples from this song.

  Sampling has long been used in music. It was once achieved through cutting and putting together loops from tape recordings or messing around with a vinyl record on the record player. It was like a collage project, piecing together different elements to create a whole new song. Although it wasn’t until the 1960s that it really began to spread in use through hip-hop and electronica.

  Artists have been known to sample whole chord progressions or melodies from someone else’s song. Some have hijacked an entire song and others have been described as sampling “vibes” from other songs. The most recent example is the controversy surrounding Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” — let’s not even discuss the salacious video and lyrics — and Marvin Gaye’s “Got To Give It Up.”

  But aside from the legal responsibilities that come with sampling, there are other ramifications to consider. By taking from someone else’s song and using it in your own, are you being unoriginal? Is originality in the music industry dead?

  “If it’s someone like will.i.am, who wants to be number one on the radio and wants to make money, then that’s more of the greedier side. That’s where people start hating on it and stuff,” said Ross Hepner, a fourth-year advertising major and known as DJ Bassmonster at SCAD Atlanta Radio. “Then you have the other side of the world where you have even someone like me who can make a track on Garage Band and throw it up on SoundCloud. I’m just trying to get my name out there. I’m not trying to make money.”

  As a music lover and a DJ, Hepner finds that more positive things are happening in the underground and unsigned territory of the music industry. “There’s a fine line between bringing new life to the old music and making something more selfish, like, for yourself to take credit for it,” he says. An example of an artist who uses a great deal of samples in a creative and original way is dubstep artist, Pretty Lights.

  Dubstep is the newest genre of music that evolved from UK garage that utilizes samples. Pretty Lights, a rising star of dubstep, is known for using borrowed hip-hop and vintage soul samples. However, he recently released an album, “A Color Map of the Sun,” which is totally composed of un-borrowed samples. It has sounds that he himself generated and music he recorded from jam sessions with others. It seems that it’s all in the way samples are used together.

  For instance, if you took the 1989 hit “Express Yourself” by Madonna and replaced it with, say, more electronica type sounds in the instrumentals and sped up the tempo, then sang your own lyrics to the music — wait, that’s what Lady Gaga did with “Born This Way.” Yet, is doing something like that being original? With the widespread access to production software, anyone could do the exact same thing and release it as their own.